bite-sized inspo * music * meals * and more
Links to all 5 of Taylor Swift’s TTPD Playlists – on Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music – taking listeners through the 5 Stages of Heartbreak It’s a fortnight before The Tortured Poets Department release on April 19th, and of course Taylor Swift marked the occasion …
A red and blue swirled Midnights album smoothie bowl – perfect for celebrating February and Taylor Swift’s Grammy nominations! The Grammy’s and Midnights The Grammy’s are now just a few days away, so you can bet I’ve got Midnights on my mind. Will you be watching? It’s …
Sourdough bagels but make it 1989 (Taylor’s Version) – these ‘Welcome To New York’ bagels are a fun and delicious way to use up sourdough discard!
There are two Taylor Swift songs I have long associated with New Year’s. One is New Year’s Day – for obvious reasons.
The other is Welcome To New York. I think it’s because I have such vivid memories of watching Taylor Swift opening her New Year’s Rockin’ Eve performance in 2015 with that song. I remember thinking how meaningful it must have been for her to perform it in the heart of New York City as we all waited for the ball to drop and begin the new year.
New York City is famous for their bagels. So I decided to make 1989-themed bagels! My family is obsessed with homemade sourdough bagels – I make them almost weekly, just in normal spherical shapes. But I can confirm that when they’re shaped like 1989, and you’re eating them listening to Welcome To New York (Taylor’s Version), the experience is even better.
Here’s the recipe for these sourdough Welcome to New York bagels. Plus, I put together a YouTube video showing you the process of how I made them too! Let me know if you want more content about sourdough. (Like how I make a weekly regular batch of these bagels, for example). I’d be happy to share!
Add warm water (between 90-95F), sourdough discard, instant yeast, honey and salt into a large mixing bowl. Mix well.
Add the flour. Mix with your hands or use a stand mixer, until all ingredients are well incorporated into a ball. The dough will be rough and dry at first, but work with it and knead it and it’ll come together and smooth out.
Leave to rise until the dough has at least doubled in size. I usually leave it for an hour.
Once the dough has risen, turn out the dough on a cutting board, and use a bench scraper to divide the dough into equal portions. For this recipe I cut it into 12 portions, and shaped 8 of them into 2 sets of 1989 numbers.
Once they're shaped, leave them to sit and rise a bit more – cover with a tea towel.
Boil water in a big pot on the stove (with some added honey), and pre-heat the oven to 350F.
Once the water is boiling, boil your bagels for about 30-60 seconds on each side. Then bake for ~25mins or until golden brown on top.
Once they're baked, allow them to cool, cut them open, spread with your preferred topping(s), and enjoy!
Taylor Swift’s Chai Sugar Cookies recipe – including both Taylor’s (handwritten) version, and my veganized version for any plant-based Swifties! If there’s something you should probably know about Taylor Swift, it’s that she’s an amazing baker. I mean, I don’t know from personal experience (I …
Links to every single Taylor Swift playlist I’ve curated and shared on social media – happy listening! I *love* making Taylor Swift-themed playlists – I post at least one every month (often more), curating playlists for every month, season and more. Let me know if …
My Swiftie Gift Guide – organized by Taylor Swift Era, with a wide range of prices and items to fit different budgets and interests!
‘Tis the season! The holidays are here, and whether you’re looking for a gift for the Swiftie in your life, or just an extra treat for yourself, here’s my Swiftie Gift Guide. I started off with some general Swiftie Gift Ideas. Then I have more gift ideas, organized by Taylor Swift Era.
I’ve bought a few of these items myself, but the vast majority of this list I haven’t (it’s my dream to be able to afford Taylor Swift merch someday, but for now I content myself with listening to her music 24/7). However, I spent awhile combing the web, looking for fun and creative items I’d love to receive myself, and checking out the reviews for every single item (so you don’t have to!). I tried to find items with higher reviews and happy customers. My hope is if you purchase anything from this Swiftie Gift Guide you’ll be as pleased as the reviews I read. Or if nothing from this list quite fits what you’re looking for, maybe it can inspire other ideas for your Swiftie gift giving!
I feel like almost every Swiftie would appreciate a vinyl of any Taylor Swift record (Taylor’s Version of course). I want to start a collection myself, and I don’t even have a vinyl record player – but that’s also another fun gift idea! I’ve been eyeing this one on Amazon (it’s even 1989 blue!): Victrola Journey+ Bluetooth Suitcase Record Player with Matching Record Stand
You could also gift a month (or more) of a music streaming service, to listen to Taylor Swift’s music anytime!
That’s my Swiftie Gift Guide! Let me know if I missed out on any gift ideas that you think would be perfect for a Swiftie. Wishing you the most wonderful holiday season!
*I participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Thank you for your support!
How to make Dong Geu-ra-mi’s Gimbap, as seen in the show Extraordinary Attorney Woo: a meal that’s just as fun to make as it is to eat! Extraordinary Attorney Woo On August 28th, 2022, ma and I watching the season 1 finale of the show …
Easy vegan key lime pies requiring just 9 simple ingredients – perfect for creating ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ vibes (iykyk) The Last Great American Dynasty I can so clearly remember listening to Folklore for the very first time. Do you remember that surprise drop?! …
A blue-tiful overnight oats ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ breakfast bowl, with all the fruit toppings to take you to Cousins Beach.
This summer I finally started watching The Summer I Turned Pretty. And I have to say, I’m kinda obsessed. It’s your typical teen drama – except that it isn’t. The relationships, conversations, narratives, everything feels so natural and authentic. There’s drama, and a love triangle that’s really pretty awkward. But overall it feels like an open door into the lives of two families, and how the waves of life affect their different relationships.
I started Season 1 enjoying the show, but I wasn’t super invested until a few episodes in. I’m not sure what exactly did it for me. The fact that cancer became part of the storyline definitely left me feeling a bit more raw than I’m used to by the end of the season. (My mum recently went through breast cancer treatment.) It’s handled really carefully in the show, and you don’t see any of the cancer itself, just the effects of it – which is quite powerful and really well done.
Even without such a personal tying factor, I think the show would have gripped me regardless. The actors are all so talented, and at any given time I could be in love with each of them, and then equally annoyed and frustrated with them all. Which sounds about right for a teenage drama, don’t you think?
If you want to follow along with my live reactions to each episode as I watch it, you can follow along with my Thread. (Yes, I’m on Thread! I just never got into Twitter and then Instagram made it so easy to set up a Thread account. And now I cannot stop LOL.)
Of course I had to made a The Summer I Turned Pretty breakfast bowl. And overnight oats are the perfect summertime breakfast to pair the show with. While making my typical bowl of hot porridge this morning, I found myself thinking that it was definitely way too hot for that. It’s been in the 90s this whole week, and the humidity in Washington DC is no joke. So move over hot breakfasts, cause it’s about to become the summer of overnight oats for me!
A bowl like this is the best way to start the day when you want something equally refreshing and delicious.
To get this gorgeous blue color, I use blue spirulina powder. You really can’t taste it at all. Plus it brings some health benefits along with the prettiest blue color to your bowl. The Summer I Turned Pretty gives me all the blue vibes. I was picturing the blue of the beach and the pools that are so frequently highlighted in the show. The rest of the toppings are adaptable, but I went for vibrant fruits to make the bowl as pretty as possible. Hopefully it lives up to the shows’ title.
I’ve also recently gotten into making music mashups (putting those music degrees to good use!). I’m having the best time mashing up Taylor Swift songs! Her songs are so prominent on The Summer I Turned Pretty soundtrack. (To be honest, it’s the main reason I started watching in the first place!). Season 2 is already off to a flying start with the first three episodes. I wanted my mashup to be meaningful to the show, so I used the songs This Love and Back to December. Or, as someone commented on my mashup post, Conrad and Belly’s love song and break up song (tears). You can go give it a listen here!
My top tips for picking the perfect ripe watermelon, every single time! Are you a watermelon lover? For me, summer time is all about digging into a perfectly sweet and refreshing ripe watermelon. But do you feel like you can never quite pick the ripest …
It wasn’t this blog, this blog just launched today! But it was a blog and I had high hopes for it. At the time I was embarking on one of the greatest adventures of my life – I had taken my first international flight moving to another country where I would finally get to explore the wider world (and hopefully pick up a British accent) whilst living in London, UK. It was all incredibly exciting and I wanted to document everything – mostly for myself, but also for family and friends back home. I actually just had a cheeky look back at that blog and it was so fun to walk down memory lane, so I suppose it served its purpose a little bit.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, that blog never really got off the ground. It had a few sputtering starts and restarts. I put up posts every now and then. And (to my credit) I uploaded loads of photos somewhat regularly because I’m a bit of a photographing fiend – have you seen my Instagram stories? However, exciting things just kept happening too fast (don’t you just hate it when that happens?), and a blog became too much for me to keep up with. I wonder if any of you can relate, and have your own lost blogs that live somewhere forgotten on the Internet, or in the files on your laptop?
I’ve thought quite a bit about why this happened, especially as I’ve been working on this new blog – and how long it’s taken to get off the ground. Mainly I think I got swamped with the amount of stuff I felt I had to do – the hundreds, which quickly became thousands of photos to sort through and edit (my photographing strategy has always been to take loads of photos and hope that some turn out halfway decent – usually it works, but it requires so much time to wade through). And then there was all of the writing, proofreading, formatting, and as experiences piled up it began to feel like too much to keep up with.
All of this, combined with my indecision and perfectionism, resulted in a false start. I felt like I couldn’t craft blog posts that I deemed worthy of publishing. I don’t know why I felt so much pressure given that my readers were family and a few close friends who I knew wouldn’t have judged my posts (too harshly at least). But I’ve always felt a strong degree of (self-imposed) pressure to produce things to a certain standard, and in my head I couldn’t meet the bar.
That same perfectionism and pressure has played a big part in keeping me from starting this blog.
You may (or may not) be surprised to hear that I’d been thinking about starting a food blog for over a year now, with the original intention to launch at the beginning of the new year – yes this year, 2018. I know, I know, it’s August…so you can see how that went!
Side note for my Instagram peeps who have followed along with the whole slight saga – thanks for sticking with me! Can you believe it’s finally happening?? I hardly can, it’s really been a long time coming.
I think the main thing was that I had thought the content I was sharing, and even myself as a person, needed to be at a certain point before I could start – that I had to be super healthy and fit, a whiz in the kitchen, and an organised writer who had something polished to share with the world. Over time, as I’ve struggled with balancing studies and life and Instagram, dealt with some health issues, and felt further and further from that ‘ready version’ I thought I needed to be, I kept pushing blogging further and further away. It’s been a slow and gradual process, but I’ve come to realise that I’ll never reach that polished level of expertise I’m aiming for. And now I genuinely think a lot of the value of this community and sharing a blog is to bring you along for the ride and show you the journey along the way.
This blog might (definitely) be messy.
It will likely not be as organised or as professional as I want – especially when I look at how many incredible and beautiful blogs there are out there. I have to face the realities that I am at a different stage in my health journey, my blogging journey (hello beginnings!), and in my life as a full-time doctoral student also trying to live in an expensive city abroad.
But I’ve also recognised that I don’t have to be the end product right now.
And I hope that by bringing you into my life at this moment, as I’m still working on balance and health and life, that you can find some value, inspiration, encouragement or comfort from any of it.
I want to share the process of launching and growing this little corner of the Internet. And I guess this is a space for me to muse about what that process is like. I hope it might be interesting. I hope even more so that it might be helpful. I’m not entirely sure what this series will look like, but at the moment I envision it being a place to share helpful tips and tricks that I learn and implement along my blogging journey.
So, this is the beginning of my blogging journey. Where are you on yours? Have you started a blog? Or ever wanted to? I’d love to hear any stories you might want to share (and how long it took/is taking you to launch yours? =P)